I've developed a bot for gox trading (hosted on google app engine) which I've been using with reasonable success so far (avg profit 1-3% per day). I am considering opening it up to outside investors and want to get an idea of the demand for such a service. I will most likely settle on taking a percentage of the profits that it generates (as opposed to alternate pricing schemes).

It is certainly not as profitable [longer term] as simply holding at this point but it does offer the advantage of capitalizing on the near-constant noise (and is thus a good avenue for diversification). I will, of course, over time increase its efficiency and customizability but it is already reasonably efficient and customizable.

It is relatively easy. I did also develop a bot like this, and it works quite well. The reason for this is because market is very liquid. You can buy and sell with a small profit every day, just by watching indicators (such as RSI or MACD).

Yea, it will be even more profitable when one or both of two things occurs--

1 - gox lowers fees due to competitive pressure.2 - gox increases the frequency of price updates (or volume increases to the point where this makes sense or just happens--not entirely sure how quotes are updated currently).

But, as I said, it is a decent profit now (considering that it's a 'set it and forget it' scenario). And, the more capital I have to throw around, the more so it will be.

Another direction I will most likely take this: a sort of meta-trader [broker] platform; i.e., executing trades on the exchange with most favorable rates (or locally).

1 - I don't have sufficient capital to maximize its potential. i.e., I am sure that I could be throwing around a lot more coinage without effecting the market dynamics much (if at all).2 - I will take a percentage of the profits for use of the bot.

Think of it like a mutual or hedge fund with myself (and my robots) as the manager.

Yea, it will be even more profitable when one or both of two things occurs--

1 - gox lowers fees due to competitive pressure.2 - gox increases the frequency of price updates (or volume increases to the point where this makes sense or just happens--not entirely sure how quotes are updated currently).

But, as I said, it is a decent profit now (considering that it's a 'set it and forget it' scenario). And, the more capital I have to throw around, the more so it will be.

Another direction I will most likely take this: a sort of meta-trader [broker] platform; i.e., executing trades on the exchange with most favorable rates (or locally).

You can keep track on the mtgox prices by reloading the buy/sell page constantly, It can go up and down extremely fast I've found. The charts don't give you good resolution and it's at least a 30s lag.

Yea, it will be even more profitable when one or both of two things occurs--

1 - gox lowers fees due to competitive pressure.2 - gox increases the frequency of price updates (or volume increases to the point where this makes sense or just happens--not entirely sure how quotes are updated currently).

But, as I said, it is a decent profit now (considering that it's a 'set it and forget it' scenario). And, the more capital I have to throw around, the more so it will be.

Another direction I will most likely take this: a sort of meta-trader [broker] platform; i.e., executing trades on the exchange with most favorable rates (or locally).

You can keep track on the mtgox prices by reloading the buy/sell page constantly, It can go up and down extremely fast I've found. The charts don't give you good resolution and it's at least a 30s lag.

Keep in mind that mtgox has some nice APIs that report in realtime all trades and whatnot.

You can see it working with several pages around the web (bitcoincharts, bitcoinwatch, bitcoinmonitor...) and Gribble (the irc bot, that reports in real-time all exchange transactions made on #bitcoin-market on freenode network)

Yea, it will be even more profitable when one or both of two things occurs--

1 - gox lowers fees due to competitive pressure.2 - gox increases the frequency of price updates (or volume increases to the point where this makes sense or just happens--not entirely sure how quotes are updated currently).

But, as I said, it is a decent profit now (considering that it's a 'set it and forget it' scenario). And, the more capital I have to throw around, the more so it will be.

Another direction I will most likely take this: a sort of meta-trader [broker] platform; i.e., executing trades on the exchange with most favorable rates (or locally).

You can keep track on the mtgox prices by reloading the buy/sell page constantly, It can go up and down extremely fast I've found. The charts don't give you good resolution and it's at least a 30s lag.

MtGox has a WebSockets API, which is feeding you depth/trade data in real-time, which is what my bot is using. No need to hammer the servers with HTTP requests.

Yea, it will be even more profitable when one or both of two things occurs--

1 - gox lowers fees due to competitive pressure.2 - gox increases the frequency of price updates (or volume increases to the point where this makes sense or just happens--not entirely sure how quotes are updated currently).

But, as I said, it is a decent profit now (considering that it's a 'set it and forget it' scenario). And, the more capital I have to throw around, the more so it will be.

Another direction I will most likely take this: a sort of meta-trader [broker] platform; i.e., executing trades on the exchange with most favorable rates (or locally).

You can keep track on the mtgox prices by reloading the buy/sell page constantly, It can go up and down extremely fast I've found. The charts don't give you good resolution and it's at least a 30s lag.

MtGox has a WebSockets API, which is feeding you depth/trade data in real-time, which is what my bot is using. No need to hammer the servers with HTTP requests.

WebSockets would be nice but unfortunately AppEngine doesn't support it yet.

It's not a thing that they have to support for it to work. WebSockets are just a layer of communication over simple socket connection. You can even try to telnet the service and send in some header data and it will work. There already is some code in Python for handling WebSockets: https://github.com/mtah/python-websocket

Google AppEngine does not allow socket connections. I saw 'typhoonae' but it is merely a proposal (or suggested implementation). It requires modifications to the SDK (which are, of course, fine for testing locally) but will not work when your code is deployed to App Engine itself (which uses a standard SDK).

Also, 'AppEngine Channels' is a competitor [an equivalent but different (yet another protocol)] to WebSockets and Gox would have to explicitly support it if he wants to (i.e., via [albeit simple] code).